Covariant Hamiltonian evolution in supersymmetric quantum systems

Abstract

We develop a general formalism for covariant Hamiltonian evolution of supersymmetric (field) theories by making use of the fact that these can be represented on the exterior bundle over their bosonic configuration space as generalized Dirac-Kaehler systems of the form $(d \pm d^\dag)\ket{\psi} = 0$. By using suitable deformations of the supersymmetry generators we find covariant Hamiltonians for target spaces with general gravitational and Kalb-Ramond field backgrounds and discuss their perturbation theory. As an example, these results are applied to the study of curvature corrections of superstring spectra for $AdS_3 x S^3$ close to its pp-wave limit.